founder-community
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Sean Kane and the business of being useful
Before F6S, Sean Kane helped take social networking onto mobile phones. An accelerator’s recruitment problem gave him another audience to connect: founders looking for a way forward.
Beatriz Gomez Is Making Payroll a Dinner Conversation
Ontop's CMO traded the mass-marketing megaphone for tables of 15, then built a data engine behind the dinner. Her playbook is a study in intimacy, local context and the useful art of listening.
Kyle Harrison
Kyle Harrison is a General Partner at Contrary, the talent- and research-driven venture capital firm based in San Francisco. He joined in 2022 to co-found the firm's later-stage investment practice, bringing nearly a decade of experience from Index Ventures, Coatue Management, and TCV, where he backed companies including Ramp, Pave, Anduril, GitLab, Databricks, Snowflake, Figma, and Robinhood. Beyond deploying capital, Harrison built Contrary Research - one of the largest private market research platforms in the world, with 100,000+ subscribers and 500+ published reports. He also publishes the Investing 101 newsletter on Substack (26,000+ subscribers) and co-authored 'The Anduril Thesis,' a 300-page deep dive that took two years and 500+ sources to produce. Married to Camden, father of four, and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Maria Palma
Maria Palma is a General Partner at Freestyle Capital, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture capital firm. With over a decade of venture experience and investments in 35+ companies, she focuses on early-stage AI investments across application and infrastructure layers. Before Freestyle, she was a General Partner at Kindred Capital in London and a Principal at RRE Ventures in New York. She co-founded NYC Blend, a nonprofit connecting underrepresented founders to venture capital, and was named to Business Insider's 'The Seed 40: Best Women Early-Stage Investors of 2025.'
Charlie Olson
Charlie Olson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pando, a San Francisco-based fintech platform that lets high-potential professionals — founders, athletes, and ambitious earners — pool their career income risk. Launched in 2017 after Charlie and co-founder Eric Lax graduated from Stanford GSB, Pando has grown to serve 900+ clients in pools expected to collectively earn over $11 billion. The company has raised $13.8M total funding including an $8M Series A led by Core Innovation Capital in 2020. Charlie was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2019 and previously worked in private equity and policy. Pando's model — participants contribute 1-8% of earnings above a ~$1M hurdle rate to a shared pool — draws on ideas from income-sharing agreements and mutual insurance, reimagined for the winner-take-all talent economy.